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British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

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181–190 of 255 posts

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#181

Henceforward, BA passengers will be required to bring portable power supplies with them and make them available to airport personnel when asked to do so. Failure to do so will result in forced removal from the aircraft. Over and out.

Nah, BA isn't a US airline.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's what is repeated here so often: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Is that what you tell hundreds of thousands of passengers sitting in a terminal with canceled flights and confused airline employees during one of the biggest holiday weekends? If your credit card number gets stolen or worse, your identity, and it's up to you to get that straightened out, are you just going to shrug your sho…

I'm saying yes, maybe that is the case. Maybe those scenarios are either a) cheaper to handle on occasion than building systems which will never fail, or b) unavoidable (with some low probability). Air travel itself is not 100% safe. Planes crash. People die. Yet we feel that the probabilities are enough in our favor that we accept it.

What? "We" don't accept anything: strict regulations and processes were put in place to reduce the probability of accidents to the absolute minimum. Did this stop manufacturers and airlines to spearhead this or that new plane? Maybe - very few companies can carry that sort of compliance effort; but it's why the public trust air travel as fundamentally safe (statistically speaking, it's probably safer than cars).

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can hire 'ten for one' in a country A. Rather: 'two for one'.

Why just two? The average salary in a western country is many times that in a third world country, and ten times is not that unusual.

What country are you talking about? In India I don't know but in China the living costs are skyrocketing and are in many occasions more expensive than in major western cities. 2 for 1 (if the team lives in a big city) or at most 4 for 1 is what I believe would be the upper bound.

Well if you truly talk about "third world country" then sure, 10 for 1 but what kind of country and IT operation would that be?

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#184
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantas, the airline of Australia, outsources its IT operations to IBM. They did not choose the cheapest alternative, but a reliable one. I believe IBM was responsible for the Australian census debacle in 2016. Hardly a ringing endorsement of their reliability, and not the only high-profile instance of them messing things up. "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM" though.

While I can't speak to the exact circumstances, IBM when it takes over operations often hires the IT staff of the firm it is taking over operations from and runs systems on multiple-year contracts. At any rate, I believe few would contest that IBM in general is a more reliable vendor than Tata, other Indian suppliers or say, offices in Poland. EDIT: Details on IBM and Australian census. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201…

No word about Accenture

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I did not, and that's the issue, a lot of these people are not actually interested in making things any better, they'd rather not be disturbed instead. And then something like what happened today happens. And then people are misdirecting blame to others. The leadership is in most cases to blame.

Interesting. What approach did you use to tell them about the product they hadn't heard of before?

The problem is, that for CTOs, there are so many people who 'know' how to make things better for them. You can't listen to them all.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I did not, and that's the issue, a lot of these people are not actually interested in making things any better, they'd rather not be disturbed instead. And then something like what happened today happens. And then people are misdirecting blame to others. The leadership is in most cases to blame.

Interesting. What approach did you use to tell them about the product they hadn't heard of before?

In that particular case I contacted them by email, introduced myself and explained why I had contacted them specifically, what I knew about what they were doing and the problem I was solving and asked if they wanted to discuss it. They responded and said they were not interested. I replied and said that's fine, if they change their mind to get back in touch. They wrote back again with the 'foad' response as you suggested, really quite a shock considering I had expressed already that it was all good and I had considered it the end of the conversation and didn't actually expect a reply. Unless I actually share the emails with you I'm sure it just sounds like he said she said but I do think I'm describing this quite accurately, most people did not reply like this, especially people who I had researched and were generally interested in software and tech, they were either interested in discussing the opportunity or calmly explained why they were already good. I am just providing my experience of some bad leadership at the top when it comes to software/tech.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#187
post #65

Hopefully, this will be a wake-up call to the industry - government regulation in IT is needed.

What's always worked in the past is hire good people, pay them well, treat them well and train them well. Pretty simple. Authoritarian type companies tend to do poorly at that though.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#188

By using IT outsourcing in India (Tata?), Poland, BA and its parent is revealing some important information: They are cutting corners to the point of risking airline operations. The question is, where else are they unnecessarily cutting corners? Are they cutting unnecessary corners on airplane maintenance? Other quality airlines have outsourced IT or part of their IT operations, but they are careful about choosing th…

Yes, it's a cyclic trend in IT: Step 0. Well functioning and balanced company. Step 1. Why these engineers are so expensive? We can hire 'ten for one' in 'country A'. Step 2. Cut local IT budget twice, put goals to have *zero* local IT budget in 2 years. Outsource everything to 'country A'. Step 3. People are fired, everything is outsourced, operational knowledge accumulated over the last few years is lost. Step 4. W…

The problem is (and I've seen this happening) for many managers or C-levels, it's really hard to see the distinction between high- and low quality. They just can't tell.

So if all offers look the same quality to you, you obviously buy the cheapest.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. What approach did you use to tell them about the product they hadn't heard of before?

In that particular case I contacted them by email, introduced myself and explained why I had contacted them specifically, what I knew about what they were doing and the problem I was solving and asked if they wanted to discuss it. They responded and said they were not interested. I replied and said that's fine, if they change their mind to get back in touch. They wrote back again with the 'foad' response as you sugge…

Well, it certainly sounds like you spammed them. :(
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